To Vaccinate or Not---The Rat Flu Odyssey Continues

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Originally Posted by mcski

This is what I’m trying to get across. And has the temporary mask dropping definitely added to it. They messaging was that breakthrough infections would be a small fraction at most. Either they were over optimistic or delta changed the entire equation or both.

The main point is that all the changes in messaging got converted to more hesitancy and more antivax chatter

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Not to get all conspiratorial, but maybe that was by design? Note, the advice was to not mask if you are vaccinated. People who were not vaccinated took that as meaning they could lie and just not mask. Cases went ape shit, hospital ICUs filled up, lots of unnecessary death. I think if people who were not vaccinated actually followed masking guidelines things may have been different. It was naive, at best, to think the freedumb antivax crowd would continue to, or in most cases start masking.

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Originally Posted by The AD

Something I still don't understand (and not sure anyone does) is why major outbreaks tend to ramp up so quickly, and then subside just as quickly. Take the recent statistics from Florida for example. In June the state was chugging along at under 1,500 new cases per day. The seven day average then started shooting up and peaked in mid-August at almost 30,000 new cases per day with a single day record of 56,000 new cases on August 16th! Now they are back down to under 5,000 new cases per day. How can this be accounted for? Even with those kind of new cases numbers the total number of cases in Florida is 3.5 million since the start of the pandemic. There are 21.5 million people in Florida, so still only about one in six has tested positive for COVID. So what's going on?

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Happened in India as well as delta exploded and subsided way before vaccines would have had any real impact. They had a lot of dead but i thought there would be even more and it would have lasted much longer than it did. Haven’t seen much science discussion how this is happening other than people and group dynamics shifting behaviors rapidly

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Originally Posted by mcski

Happened in India as well as delta exploded and subsided way before vaccines would have had any real impact. They had a lot of dead but i thought there would be even more and it would have lasted much longer than it did. Haven’t seen much science discussion how this is happening other than people shifting behaviors rapidly

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It is interesting. I'm sure it's being studied.

the FL example is a good one though...especially when compared to states that take preventative measures (i.e., masking, social distancing) more seriously. Sure, the virus ramped up and lasted over a similar amount of time, but because FL did zero on the preventative front they had much more death than other populous states per capita.

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Originally Posted by mcski

Haven’t seen much science discussion how this is happening other than people and group dynamics shifting behaviors rapidly

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And I'm sure peoples' behaviors are affected, but hardly enough to explain why cases would just drop off a cliff. In India you've got a massive number of people living in abject poverty. There really wasn't much that group could do to mitigate the spread of COVID. In Florida it's hard for me to believe enough was done to explain the drop in new cases, especially when you consider kids returned to school and cases still went down rapidly. Some things about the spread of this virus just seem to defy explanation. There's some mechanism at work here we don't fully understand.

FWIW, an article from last May on the Yankees outbreak, two recent studies showing transmission among the vax'd is much lower then unvax'd, and antibodies elicited by SARS2 mRNA vaccines are at a higher magnitude and complementary to natural infection :

1) What Really Happened With that Weird Yankees COVID Outbreak: I’ve always said that it is very unlikely that these vaccines will create fully sterilizing immunity. Sterilizing immunity is the kind of immunity where, if you get exposed and the virus lands in your respiratory tract, it will be neutralized (or killed) immediately. It will not have a chance to replicate. On the other hand, you can have very highly protective vaccines that are not fully sterilizing — vaccines that prevent you from illness, especially severe illness, but may still allow the virus to grow.

A PCR test can catch just ten molecules of virus. But this is a virus that when it is contagious, there are billions of molecules. So we have to be very careful about how we interpret PCR results. Just because the virus can grow a bit — and be detected on a PCR test — does not mean we are stuck in the woods as far as herd immunity goes.


2) A new study found that vax'd breakthroughs were less likely to spread Covid. In addition to reducing your risk of becoming seriously ill from the virus, getting vaccinated also protects those around you.


3) According to a CDC analysis of an outbreak involving the Delta variant at nine US summer youth camps shows there was no further transmission to fully vaccinated individuals. There was also no further transmission from breakthrough cases. Vaccination stopped the train of transmission.


4) And if you are re-or infected the immune response from mRNA vaccination bolsters the overall response:

1. SARS2 mRNA vaccines elicit higher levels of antibodies compared to natural infections
2. SARS2 infections, but not mRNA vaccinations, elicit high levels of antibodies that bind strongly to seasonal coronaviruses but weakly to SARS2

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Originally Posted by The AD

And I'm sure peoples' behaviors are affected, but hardly enough to explain why cases would just drop off a cliff. In India you've got a massive number of people living in abject poverty. There really wasn't much that group could do to mitigate the spread of COVID. In Florida it's hard for me to believe enough was done to explain the drop in new cases, especially when you consider kids returned to school and cases still went down rapidly. Some things about the spread of this virus just seem to defy explanation. There's some mechanism at work here we don't fully understand.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/b...-us-cases.html

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Covid-19 is once again in retreat.

The reasons remain somewhat unclear, and there is no guarantee that the decline in caseloads will continue. But the turnaround is now large enough — and been going on long enough — to deserve attention.

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Originally Posted by MultiVerse

1) What Really Happened With that Weird Yankees COVID Outbreak: I’ve always said that it is very unlikely that these vaccines will create fully sterilizing immunity. Sterilizing immunity is the kind of immunity where, if you get exposed and the virus lands in your respiratory tract, it will be neutralized (or killed) immediately. It will not have a chance to replicate. On the other hand, you can have very highly protective vaccines that are not fully sterilizing — vaccines that prevent you from illness, especially severe illness, but may still allow the virus to grow.

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That NY Mag piece also mentioned that the Yankee players received the J&J vaccine.

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Originally Posted by mcski

Happened in India as well as delta exploded and subsided way before vaccines would have had any real impact. They had a lot of dead but i thought there would be even more and it would have lasted much longer than it did. Haven’t seen much science discussion how this is happening other than people and group dynamics shifting behaviors rapidly

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Heterogeneity of behavior and common contacts within subcultures may explain a chunk of this (it was discussed here a long time ago, maybe LSL can describe it better).

Take a certain segment of the population who interact with each other more often and infect a few of them so the exponential growth is very prominent in that group. They suddenly all know someone who got sick, which means both that they get a bump toward sub-cultural/local herd immunity and that they suddenly take it very seriously. Obviously no group is totally isolated, but some really do interact with their own a lot more than not.

Hi guys. What do you all think of this? I started reading it but I got a really bad headache and my nose started bleeding. I'm not sure if it's from reading this or from getting my booster shot.

By the way I'm a transexual (pronouns SKII/SKOO/SCAA) from Florida. Not sure if that matters or not.

i.imgur. com/4aIXtbT.png

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Originally Posted by PNWbrit

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/b...-us-cases.html

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Thanks for that. From that article:

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Epidemiologists do not understand why. Many popular explanations, like seasonality or the ebbs and flows of social distancing, are clearly insufficient, if not wrong. The two-month cycle has occurred during different seasons of the year and occurred even when human behavior was not changing in obvious ways.

The most plausible explanations involve some combination of virus biology and social networks. Perhaps each virus variant is especially likely to infect some people but not others — and once many of the most vulnerable have been exposed, the virus recedes. And perhaps a variant needs about two months to circulate through an average-sized community.

Human behavior does play a role, with people often becoming more careful once caseloads begin to rise. But social distancing is not as important as public discussion of the virus often imagines. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” as Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota, has told me.

The recent declines, for example, have occurred even as millions of American children have again crowded into school buildings.

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Originally Posted by mcski

Happened in India as well as delta exploded and subsided way before vaccines would have had any real impact. They had a lot of dead but i thought there would be even more and it would have lasted much longer than it did. Haven’t seen much science discussion how this is happening other than people and group dynamics shifting behaviors rapidly

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Nobody really knows why the waves occur but things that impact the overall size (magnitude) and duration along with other effects are understood.

Even though the waves explode and subside, comparing India where multiple lines of evidence indicate the cases / death toll was millions more than the official count verses countries with high vax rates shows vaccines had a considerable impact on damping the Delta wave.

In other news Facebook is down.. Someone Tweeted.. "quick, go tell your aunt and uncle to go get vaccinated before it comes back up!"

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Originally Posted by SumJongGuy

In other news Facebook is down.. Someone Tweeted.. "quick, go tell your aunt and uncle to go get vaccinated before it comes back up!"

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Good one. Gotta say if it went down permanently it would probably be a good thing for humanity.

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Originally Posted by MultiVerse

Nobody really knows why the waves occur but things that impact the overall size (magnitude) and duration along with other effects are understood.

Even though the waves explode and subside, comparing India where multiple lines of evidence indicate the cases / death toll was millions more than the official count verses countries with high vax rates shows vaccines had a considerable impact on damping the Delta wave.

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I totally agree the official count was not near the number actually infected or killed, but regardless of the actual numbers, cases still dropped without any discernible reason and with millions of hosts still available and in close proximity

Edit speaking of India only

It's also important to realize that within the ebbs and flows of an outbreak, even with a very high percentage of people who have symptoms, that the virus is barely scratching the surface in terms of the total number of people it infects vs those that are succeptible.

All of those bad outbreaks of Delta variant in Florida, Miss, Lousianna, Alabama- barely infected a sum total of 3-6% of overall the total population since the beginning of July. But the distribution is highly unequal- pockets of really high infections and pockets of almost no infections. Rural areas driving more disease per 100K than urban areas. Not just people mixing but how they are mixing.

This pandemic may go down as a very large global case study on how human beings interact. It's pretty amazing that a virus can spread like wildfire and then--just like that--start retreating when there's still a huge population remaining unaffected.

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Originally Posted by SumJongGuy

In other news Facebook is down.. Someone Tweeted.. "quick, go tell your aunt and uncle to go get vaccinated before it comes back up!"

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Attachment 387852

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Originally Posted by The AD

This pandemic may go down as a very large global case study on how human beings interact. It's pretty amazing that a virus can spread like wildfire and then--just like that--start retreating when there's still a huge population remaining unaffected.

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The real viruses are in the internet.

https://nationalpost.com/news/an-ant...-might-be-over

Out spoken anti vax covid denying NHL hockey player gets covid and myocarditis which could be the end of his hockey career

“The back half of the 14-day quarantine Arch wasn’t feeling well and got a severe viral infection,” said Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett. “He tried to skate a few days, they did a bunch of tests and the tests showed at some point he had contracted COVID. He got a bunch of blood work done and he’s been diagnosed with the myocarditis. He’s having a CT scan and an MRI this week. He’s out indefinitely until we figure out where we are at.”

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Originally Posted by XXX-er

https://nationalpost.com/news/an-ant...-might-be-over

Out spoken anti vax covid denying NHL hockey player gets covid and myocarditis which could be the end of his hockey career

“The back half of the 14-day quarantine Arch wasn’t feeling well and got a severe viral infection,” said Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett. “He tried to skate a few days, they did a bunch of tests and the tests showed at some point he had contracted COVID. He got a bunch of blood work done and he’s been diagnosed with the myocarditis. He’s having a CT scan and an MRI this week. He’s out indefinitely until we figure out where we are at.”

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Myocarditis used to be extremely rare, less than 200K cases per year... "USED TO"..

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Originally Posted by XXX-er

https://nationalpost.com/news/an-ant...-might-be-over

Out spoken anti vax covid denying NHL hockey player gets covid and myocarditis which could be the end of his hockey career

“The back half of the 14-day quarantine Arch wasn’t feeling well and got a severe viral infection,” said Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett. “He tried to skate a few days, they did a bunch of tests and the tests showed at some point he had contracted COVID. He got a bunch of blood work done and he’s been diagnosed with the myocarditis. He’s having a CT scan and an MRI this week. He’s out indefinitely until we figure out where we are at.”

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Myocarditis used to be extremely rare, less than 200K cases per year... "USED TO"..

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Originally Posted by XXX-er

https://nationalpost.com/news/an-ant...-might-be-over

Out spoken anti vax covid denying NHL hockey player gets covid and myocarditis which could be the end of his hockey career

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Hopefully all his teammates also berate him for being a selfish prick.

Pro hockey players are highly monitored high performance athletes in peak condition so this piece shows that covid doesnt care who or what you are

looks like he unknowingly got covid over the summer off-season cuz he has Covid anitibodies

he is 28 and he had 1 year left on his contract he was raising a stink over being vaccinated and having to do 14 day quarrantines so what are his chances of coming back from Myocarditis to play anywhere in the NHL ?

you mean his ex-teammates ?

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Originally Posted by mcski

Also, to be clear, originally the vaccines were supposed to protect against all covid (prior to delta), not just keep people out of the hospital and dying. Delta changed that or they were wrong or both, but to suggest the messaging was otherwise is disengenous and lack of forthrightness about it probably created some additional hesitancy

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Not at all the message that I understood. I caveat this with the fact I'm an uneducated shmuck. From the outset I understood (from media and from this board) the vaccine would lessen my chances of getting it, and would make it less devastating on my health if I did happen to get it. You may have gotten a different message.

UV light disinfection may be ‘game changer’ to slow COVID-19 spread

https://kdvr.com/news/coronavirus/uv...vid-19-spread/